🎓 Florida AI Education: The Last Five Feet
AI can write the paper.
It cannot stand in front of three professors and defend it.
That may be one of the simplest—and smartest—ways to think about education in the age of artificial intelligence.
Richard Corcoran, president of New College of Florida and a former Florida education commissioner, describes AI in higher education as a double-edged sword. Used properly, it can accelerate research, improve drafting, and make universities more efficient. Used poorly, it can become a shortcut around the very intellectual struggle education is supposed to create.
His example is New College’s senior thesis.
Corcoran says students can use AI to help research and draft their work.
But eventually the laptop closes.
The student must stand before a panel of professors and defend the ideas.
No prompt.
No regenerate button.
No machine whispering the next sentence.
Just the student and what he or she actually understands.
❓ The Big Question: What Should Florida AI Education Measure?
If AI can do the assignment, what exactly should the assignment be measuring?
That question is going to become unavoidable.
For generations, schools have often measured learning through its outputs:
Write the essay.
Complete the homework.
Produce the research paper.
Solve the problem.
But AI can increasingly produce the output without requiring the student to experience all of the thinking that once produced it.
That doesn’t necessarily make AI cheating.
It may make some of our old measurements obsolete.
The calculator didn’t eliminate mathematics. It changed which mathematical abilities mattered.
AI could do something similar to education.
The valuable skill may become less about producing an answer and more about understanding it, challenging it, improving it—and defending it.
⭐ Why It’s Important
There is an irony developing around artificial intelligence.
As machines become better at producing things that look intelligent, education may have to become much better at determining whether the human actually is.
That could mean more conversation.
More oral defense.
More live problem-solving.
More questions without screens.
More opportunities for students to explain not simply what they believe, but why.
Corcoran argues that universities should return attention to critical thinking, communication, creativity, and the broader human skills that become more valuable as machines absorb routine intellectual work.
Florida AI education may therefore become an early test of whether schools can redesign assessment around what students actually understand rather than simply what they can produce.
Perhaps AI won’t destroy education.
Perhaps it will expose something education should have remembered all along.
The paper was never the point.
The person who could defend it was.
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